


the storm passes at last

by cottagecrowcore



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Birthday, Character Study, Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-19 09:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29997354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cottagecrowcore/pseuds/cottagecrowcore
Summary: Julian has a complicated relationship with his birthday.
Relationships: Apprentice/Julian Devorak
Kudos: 13





	the storm passes at last

**Author's Note:**

> it's julian's birthday, and what better way to celebrate than with some light angst?

Ilya remembers little of his eighth birthday. He remembers his parents’ smiling faces as they handed him gifts. He can’t remember what the gifts were. He remembers playing with Pasha and Lishka. He can’t remember what games they played. What he does remember with icy, crystalline clarity is what happened the night after his eighth birthday.

It seems like a cruel joke, how he can barely recall what Lishka’s face looked like, but he can remember her calls for help, muffled as he heard them from belowdecks. He must have happy childhood memories from those days, he knows he does, and yet they’re all blurs in comparison to the shipwreck.

Memory is a funny thing as well as a cruel thing. Even the shipwreck itself blurs and twists in his mind, the big picture going fuzzy, the most painful details have stuck with him. The noises, he thinks, are the worst. He can’t quite get them out of his head.

(There were great crashes, thunder that echoed through his bones and waves that rocked the ship to and fro. The rain came down in sheets, stabbing into the deck above him with sharp cracks. It was too dark to see anything clearly, and he was belowdecks anyways, so he could only imagine what it all looked like. 

He held Pasha tighter to his chest. This was his job as her older brother. He was going to protect her.

“Ilya,” she said, and her voice sounded so small and so scared, “are we gonna die?”

That wasn’t the kind of question any four-year-old should ask, but Pasha was always clever for her age.

Ilya was less clever, and he could not figure out how to answer.)

It wasn’t the best birthday, all things considered. 

Every night after his birthday for years, he’d insisted on sleeping with Pasha. He held her close throughout the night, and he did not let her slip from his fingers. Like a good brother should. It was silly to fear that she would drown on dry land. He knew it then, and he knows it now. For all its ridiculousness, though, he’d insisted on it. He barely slept those nights, preferring to silently watch over his sister.

His departure from Nevivon to study medicine had stopped that tradition dead in its tracks. In his travels, he barely had the time for birthday celebrations, and when anyone asked, he was quick to change the subject. He expected the date to fade from his memory, eroded by waves of time without the buffer of his tradition to stop it. It never did. He was no stranger to sleepless nights, but the night after his birthday stretched on and on infinitely. His time on those nights was spent staring out of windows, clinging to a silly belief that he could protect Pasha from seas away using only thoughts. If he was unlucky enough to spend it on a ship, he paced up and down every deck. He looked at the sky as if he expected it to strike this ship down as well, and he poked his head into the rooms of the crewmates he cared the most for every hour.

Ilya has tried to sleep on the night after his birthday before. It always ends with nightmares. He thinks that, knowing this, he should know better than to succumb to the exhaustion in his bones the night after his birthday. But he is in his thirties now, and Pasha is safe, and there is someone that he loves so deeply that they paved a new path for his life, one he had followed. Just this once, he lets himself sleep.

He doesn’t know how long it takes for the nightmares to wake him. He jolts upright in his bed, and all he can hear is the thunder and rain and Pasha’s tiny voice. Then, his eyes fall on the sleeping figure next to him.

They stir, but do not wake, and they mumble something that sounds vaguely like his name.

They are safe. He is safe. His friends and family are safe. 

He smiles at the sleeping figure and falls back into bed, pulling them closer to him.

Ilya falls asleep again, and this time the nightmares do not come for him.


End file.
